How Andrew Yang's Robot Apocalypse Can Heal a Divided Nation [View all]

[redqueen]

Old article but still a good one. This is one of the first ones I read as I started considering switching from Bernie to Yang.

The odds that the Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang will last long in the race are slim, but in the contest to describe what’s wrong with America he has become a compelling and distinctive figure. Yang’s story begins with the displacement of workers by automation. He blames Donald Trump’s 2016 victory on the loss of four million manufacturing jobs in swing states. The loss of jobs, he emphasizes, has not been limited to manufacturing. Technology has taken revenue from malls, from newspapers, from taxi-drivers. For Yang, our country’s divisions are a purely economic story, with other problems—nastiness, racism, misogyny, bad ideas—caused in part by the decline in reasoning that sets in when you can’t pay your bills. Yang talks about the rise in suicide, the rise in drug overdoses, the increase in the numbers of people claiming disability benefits. What he describes is a loss of meaning on a massive scale.

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Yang has several mottos. There’s “Humanity First.” There’s “Not left, not right, it’s forward.” He is a centrist, not as Kamala Harris or Joe Biden are centrists, by not diverging too far from the status quo, but in that he presents his policy proposals in language that disorients voters from the known ideological maps of their political platforms. His technocratic populism attracts podcast listeners, tech-industry venture capitalists, libertarians, Trump supporters, proud Asian-Americans, and white men who feel they have been unfairly blamed for the perpetuation of inequality.

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The volunteers at the phone-banking event were positive, friendly, and motivated, exemplars of the attitude that’s encouraged by the campaign. They listened carefully as Shaun Looney, an Army veteran and recent business-school graduate from Buffalo, trained them on software that offered the callers scripted cues. Yang’s conciliatory approach might feel to some like too much of a surrender. But I could see how the campaign presented a respite from the deeply depressing divisions around us.

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Brian Leff, a twenty-two-year-old political-science student at New York University, who is from Westchester County, told me that he liked that Yang “focusses so much more on solutions than ideology.” He voted for Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate, in the 2016 elections. Kyle Barrett, who is twenty-nine and works at a communications consultancy in Manhattan, said that with Yang’s U.B.I. proposal he and his wife would be able to pay off their student loans in two years. Tami Joy Schlichter, thirty-seven, is the head volunteer for the campaign in New York City. An entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in mathematical neuroscience, she said that Yang was the only candidate addressing what she saw as the most urgent issue: the displacement of workers to automation.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-andrew-yangs-robot-apocalypse-can-heal-a-divided-nation